lsespdfandomcom-20200216-history
Dissertation
What Is A 'Research Question' and Why Is It Important? After selecting your dissertation topic, the RQ is the most important part of your dissertation in terms of getting started. It guides your progress throughout the process of researching and writing the dissertation. You can think of it as the 'engine' that drives the whole dissertation writing process - it determines the type of literature you will review, the type of data you will analyse, the introduction that you write, and the conclusion that you reach. The RQ is the reason why you write the dissertation - the aim is to find out the answer to it! Another way of thinking about it is that the RQ takes you on a journey - and that journey is the dissertation! When you start, you do not know the final destination. That is what makes it interesting. How Do I Develop a Research Question? Selecting a dissertation topic is not so difficult, but formulating a good research question (RQ) is more tricky. It needs to be analytical, open-ended, and non-normative. It should not be 'future-oriented' either, such as 'Will the new policy on x contribute to improved social policy?', because you can't research something that hasn't happened yet! For example, if you are interested in the topic of participatory forest management in India, a suitable research question might be something like: "What factors have contributed to the rise of 'participatory forest management' and with what results for poor people?" This would allow you to explore (a) general literature on the history of PFM, (b) review literature on different views on the concept of participation, and © perhaps to look specifically at one 'more successful' and one 'less successful' cases of PFM in India, analyse these cases in relation to impacts on local communities, and then to draw some conclusions. Try to have a research question with different possible answers Some people are having difficulty with this particular challenge. If your RQ is 'What factors explain the poor implementation of rights-based approaches in Bihar, India?', then you will know from your initial reading that there are several different possible sets of factors - political, cultural, economic, administrative etc. They may all play a part, but your job is to decide - on the basis of the evidence - their relative importance. Some basic literature will help you at the start - 'author A finds that economic reasons are they key, while author B argues that politics are most important ... no one seems to be focusing on the administrative factors, so I plan to consider these as well and see whether this approach tells us something new'. Does this help? --David Lewis 14:37, April 17, 2010 (UTC) What is meant by 'grey literature'? Some people have mentioned 'grey literature'. Is this different from 'academic literature'? Thanks, this is an interesting question ... Mostly on the course we use 'academic' or 'research' literature, by which we mean academic articles and books. Academic research is normally systematically researched and and 'peer-reviewed' before it is published. What we mean by 'grey literature' includes publications such as project evaluation reports, World Bank country reports, field reports by NGOs, etc etc. 'Grey literature' is useful to researchers because it may be (a) up to more date than published academic research, and (b) may be very relevant to policy; but it has some important disadvantages too - it may be self-serving rather than 'objective', and it is unlikely to be peer-reviewed the way academic papers are. A good dissertation recognises and uses these different kinds of literatures to get the best from them. While academic literature should form the foundation of a dissertation (particularly for the Chapter 2 'literature review'), 'grey literature' can be useful as a good source of case study material and/or up to date or recent data (particularly for your Chapter 3). Case study questions 'I'm in the process of contacting people for my field work and had a question on which organisations I should look at. The one's that have been researched a lot or is it okay if my case study is with an organisation which hasn't been researched by academic researchers but still is a significant contributor to the field. To be more specific. One of the organisations I got in touch with is SREI-Sahaj, they have some 50000 telecentres in 4 states in India in partnership with government. But I was surprised to find no academic paper which talked about them. While a lot of smaller organizations like Akshaya telecentres have been extensively covered by academic research.' Ashima.goyal 15:45, May 4, 2010 (UTC) Good question. There's really no problem researching an organisation that has nothing as yet written about it. In fact, that's good, because your case study will be 'new', and so it might be a useful addition to knowledge. A further question though is ... What is your case study of? What type of case study is it? Is it in fact a 'case study' at all? Your possible choices are: (i) do a survey type questionnaire of a sample of organisations. Then it is a not really a case study at all, it is a 'survey study'; (ii) do a 'comparative case study' of more than one organisation, in order to compare characteristics reelvant to your RQ (e.g. a big organisation versus a small one, or a successful one versus a less successful one, etc); (iii) a 'single case study' of one org or project or network, that allows you to look into detail at how things work, and learn things not covered in the existing literature. --David Lewis 16:08, May 4, 2010 (UTC)